Crowding: Is It Always Harmful?; No, New Behavioral Studies Indicate, There Are Times When It‐May Even Be Good

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As one young Manhattan couple in a small apartment agreed half‐jokingly the other day, living in the city may be the most effective birth control method of all. “Having a baby means needing more space,” said the wife, “which means we can't have a baby.”

With most of the nation's people concentrated in sprawling, increasingly urbanized regional centers, questions about high‐density living are generating intense interest. This is the second of a series of articles exploring the subject.

Crowding—or more important, the perception of crowding—deeply affects everyone's .lives and life‐decisions.

In Japan or South America, a similar couple might think the same living space adequate for a few children. But in the West, generally, a dwelling unit with more than, one person per room is considered crowded.

Crowding has been blamed for a host of mental and physical ills, from violent behavior to heart disease. Crowding, as everyone knows, is bad. Or is it? Not necessarily, according to recent studies in the behavioral sciences, which contradict many conventional views.

One study turned up no relationship between crowding and disease or mortality. Another discounted crowding as an influence on criminality and aggressiveness. While many studies are inconclusive and disputed by others in the field, one generally accepted view is that something associated with—and possibly made worse by—crowding is causing the negative effects attributed to crowding.

What that “something” is has been variously identified as sensory “overload,” urban stress, low income, social isolation and other social, economic and psychological factors. Hormonal reactions may be involved, too.

The “something” is probably not a territorial instinct or a biological aversion to close living. Though man shows. territorial behaitior. it is a social rather than biological phenomenon. Throughout history, man has subsisted and occasionally thrived in close quarters. The American Indian long houses —accommodating as many as 500 persons—contributed to the social solidarity of a communal economy, according to one source.

Philippe Aries, the cultural historian, wrote that rooms did not become separated by function until the 18th century when “the family began to hold society at a distance.” Around this time, he noted, comfort, domesticity, privacy and isolation were born. The idea of “a room of one's own” came very late in man's evolutionary history, though it is an important value in modern America.

Studies of the disastrous effects of crowding on animals were once taken as horrifying analogies of people in cities. One classic study is John Calhoun's 1961 experiment with Norway rats in which a markedly human brand of distorted behavior and social breakdown occurred when the experimental population doubled.

The effects, one biologist noted, were not due to lack of food or space, but to social stress—the animals couldn't reproduce or nurture their young without interference by dozens of other Inhabitants. Such findings pose questions for the study of man, scientists believe, but cannot reliably predict human behavior.

Man is a uniquely adaptive animal, with reactions tied as much to socialization as to physiology. Social pressure is usually dealt with by trying to “live with” the situation. In a crowded elevator, for instance, personal space is maintained by avoiding eye contact. In a crowded apartment, a family might develop a hierarchy in the use of space to minimize conflict, such as waiting in line for the bathroom or assigning “Daddy's chair.”

It is important, too, to distinguish between household crowding and high density. Crowding means too little space per person (or, in scientific terms, the point at which a group is so, numerous that the proper distance between individuals cannot be maintained). ‘Density is simply a ratio of Units to a given area, such as persons per square mile or houses per acre.

Crowding and high density do not always occur together. Manhattan's Upper East Side, for example, has high area density but little household crowding, while the opposite is true of the South Bronx. Lately, it has been felt that high density is not harmful to man. It is the arrangement of all that humanity and the frequency of contact that are at issue.

Because it studies man in his built environment, the subject of crowding cuts across many fields and disciplines. Different specialists in the behavioral, social and physical sciences—not to mention historians, economists, ecologists and architects—are legitimately interested in crowding. New disciplines and systems of study have emerged, relating behavior to design, among them environmental psychology, sociology of design, “ekistics” (the science of human settlements) and E. T. Hall's “proxemics” (man's use of space as an elaboration of culture).

While no one has said unequivocally that crowding is good for people, the psychologist Jonathan L. Freedman of Columbia University concludes that crowding intensifies social reactions, making good experiences better and bad ones worse. “There are few reports of people in New York subway cars turning on each other in violent frenzy or of shoppers in Macy's going berserk . . .,” he observes in “Crowding and Behavior.” He challenges the assumption that crowding produces stress or negative effects on task performance.

An opposing viewpoint is held by another psychologist, Susan Saigert of City University, who finds crowding not simply a neutral “intensifier,” but an experience of “unwanted, unpredictable interference by others—a highly stressful situation that pushes man to the limits of his adaptive abilities. He becomes “overloaded” with demands from others, and reacts with confusion, anxiety or withdrawal. Where other animals might flee or fight the intruder, man can “flee” inside himself. “We do not know the longterm effects of such withdrawal,” Dr. Saegert said.

There is no doubt in either case that people do respond and adapt to crowding. At issue are the possible psychic and physical costs of this adaptation.

A person's feelings of being crowded are highly subjective and don't always coincide with actual physical crowding. We may feel crowded by a small group of people who invade our empty beach but be unaware of our neighbors in a crowded theater.

According to the anthropologist Edward T. Hall, our cultural background is the most important determinant of the conditions under which we feel crowded. Room crowding that, would distress a German would not bother Arabs, who, he writes in “The Hidden Dimension,” “do not like to be alone.” Dr. Hall notes that the Japanese, with their orderly and ritualized culture, are also able to tolerate high crowding.

Two Hong Kong studies found that rates of death, disease and social disorder there were low despite very crowded living conditions. Psychologists have noted that in New York City, despite losses of residents and jobs, people still experience the same sense of crowding. Some feel that the coexistence of widely contrasting cultures makes people more uncomfortably aware of one another.

Acquired social values, too, influence spatial concepts. At the turn of the century, the economist Thorstein Veblen noted that in America the large homes and estates of the rich had become a standard of beauty for every one. The value placed on lawns and numerous rooms, he wrote in “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” “testified to the capacity of the owner to indulge in wasteful expenditure”—a substitu lion of money for taste. Today it is hard for the wealthy and impossible for poorer people to maintain this outmoded ideal of space.

Economic realities have made highdensity and crowded living conditiOns the lot of many of us. What factors make this kind of living bearable?

Susan Saegert theorized that “having options in housing—applying your own criteria to your housing choice—helps people accommodate to small space.” In New York, many people seem satisfied to choose location over space, though they could afford to have more rooms in a less desirable neighborhood.

The institutional inmates Dr. Saegert has studied—patients or prisoners who have not chosen their surroundings—Were found to adjust better if they were given time and space for privacy.

Another mitigating factor in involuntary situations—both in institutions and outside—is knowing when you're going to get out. A recent study of graduate student families living in tight quarters turned up few complaints about crowding, since in a year they expected to afford larger homes. But negative factors were present. Husbands came home only to sleep, since they couldn't study effectively at home. Arguments were frequent between mothers and children, who were in almost constant contact during the day. Even in the rather favorable Hong Kong studies, families in the most crowded households were less likely to know where their children were.

Nevertheless, families function much better in ‘crowded, conditions than unrelated people, according to several studies. Living in a close‐knit family—oreven a cohesive neighborhood with people you trust—causes less stress than encountering strangers all the time.

The epidemiologist John Cassel and others have suggested that the negative effects on health attributed solely to crowding might actually be due to psychological responses to social factors such as low status and poor group. integration—that social stress can increase susceptibility to all kinds of disease.

While research in the. behavioral sciences seems to have had but little influence on housing, some architects have made use of it, particularly in prcblematical or unexplored situations. Architects at Conklin and Rossant, designers of the innovative “new towns,” studied sociology and even developmental psychology in preparation for some projects. But in most conventional cases, James Rossant observed, “the studio process takes over. Builders are afraid, and high construction costs make them unwilling to experiment.”

Economic requirements and behavior based design need not be inconsistent, according to Oscar Newman, the architect who wrote “Defensible Space,” an explanation and proposed remedy for the failure of many high‐rise public housing projects. Mr. Newman blames the projects design rather than their high population density for the failure.

He believes that low‐rise “humanscale” apartments can be constructed at the same cost and, density levels as the towering “human warehouses.”

“It's not the density that matters, but how many people you're sharing an envircnment with,” he said recently.

And in Oils he Sounds a theme heard. in much Of today's theory about highdensity living—that density alone isn't crucial, that the difference between “crowding” and “specializing” lies more in perception and situation than number.

Next: Density in the suburbs, where the battle for space is being waged.

While the currents of thought about crowding are changing, severe overcrowding persists among New York City's poor, especially among those who do not live in subsidized housing developments.

Indeed, in the view of community leaders and social workers exposed every day to the realities of crowding, it is the poor still jammed into tenements who are the real experts on the subject.

They cite such cases as a grandmother who shares a bed with two granddaughters, or two brothers who sleep on a mattress in the kitchen, or a mother who had to place her twin babies in foster homes because she had no room for a crib.

Andres Rosado, who works with troubled families at the Lower East Side Family Union, tells of one situation in which a husband and wife and eight children live in a two‐bedroom apartment.

Several children sleep on mattresses on the floor, while the parents share a sofa bed with one child. Two of the children are retarded and must stay all day in separate cribs.

The father, a cook in a small restaurant, earns $12,000 a year —too much for public assistance or Medicaid but not enough to support, a family of 10. “He'd do better on welfare,” Mr. Rosado said, “but he's very proud.”

Whatever their other troubles may be, and however much affection they may feel for one another, there is no question, Mr. Rosado believes, that each family. member suffers from the unremitting's contact.

“I'd like to see some of these psychologists spend a night in an apartment down here and then talk about crowding,” lie said.